During a Tuesday hearing of the subcommittee on the House Judiciary Committee dealing with the so-called weaponization of the federal government, the subcommittee’s top Democrat, Del. Stacey Plaskett (V.I.), lambasted the panel’s entire focus as oriented towards GOP political ambitions.
Both the subcommittee and the broader Judiciary panel are led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who has worked throughout this Congress on advancing his party’s investigative aims, including through targeting prosecutors who’ve gone after Trump.
“This is, in fact, the sixth time in this Select Subcommittee that a hearing of ours has had the exact same name,” Plaskett exclaimed, adding: “This is about speaking to Fox News. This is not about solving problems for the American people. We’ve come so far from what Congress has been, even in the short time that I’ve been here, which I can’t believe is almost a decade now.”
“Just since our last hearing, the fifth hearing, former President Trump has made more terrifying statements on the weaponization of the federal government should he have a second term,” Plaskett continued, pointing to the former president and continued front-runner for the GOP’s presidential nomination this year as the real problem.
She brought up the repeatedly failed but persistent arguments from Trump and his legal team that he should be judicially deemed to hold widely encompassing protections from even the possibility of criminal prosecution for actions taken amid his responsibilities as president. Plaskett also referenced ambitions from Trump of establishing a more politically loyal workforce across the federal government if he wins.
The examples just keep going. In what could be decently indicative of the general take within Trump’s circles, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) — who’s close with the former president — left open the possibility during a recent ABC interview of a president defying a Supreme Court ruling. And Trump has already spoken of potentially going after — via the justice system — political targets of his and bettering the circumstances for individuals arguably on his side like participants in the Capitol riot, who he’s suggested pardoning.
The hearing’s below:
